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Tara Fitzgerald couldn't find the nude pictures she planned on sending to her boyfriend, but instead of just taking more, she decided to see if a Dell tech support call could fix her problem. Apparently the tech support guy found them. Unfortunately, he then put them up on a site called "bitchtara."

"If you read the linked article in TFA, you will find that she BOUGHT HIM A LAPTOP AND MAILED IT TO INDIA! wtf woman"

And she was dating him onlinehttp://www.rgj.com/article/20100729/NEWS13/100729021/1321/news [rgj.com]
"Following the initial technical call, conversations between Fitzgerald and Shaikh quickly turned personal. Fitzgerald admitted being flattered by the attention from the Indian support tech, whose MySpace page identifies him as being 24 years old. "He's very charming and he knew exactly what to say. It warmed my heart," she said."

Sorry lady, the guy might have stolen your photos and called you a bitch (hence bitchtara.com) but you started dating him online and gave him your credit card and bought him gifts.

So she took the pics and then "lost them"... but the support guy found them in her email. She obviously sent/received them at some point, and how she could just 'forget' they were in her email is hard to fathom. Then she sends the guy who WORKS FOR DELL a laptop? She may be the victim, but boy is she good at it.

I wonder if he did this as retribution to something she said to him. If so, he is likely a hero in the tech support trenches of Hyderabad. If that isn't the case, then "off with his head". (Quoting Alice In Wonderland for those who might be too literal minded.)

It's the internet. The way things get recopied my guess is the pics will never really be eliminated from this point on.

You just can't stop "the signal". It's amazing how many people try though. Reminds me of a time back in high school (this was circa 1998 - the web wasn't what it was today, but it had still been around for a good long time). A guy I knew had written some poetry, and asked if there was a way that he could keep people from copying it if he posted it online. And I made sure I was understa

It's just as sad that so many asshats in our society file frivolous lawsuits making it more difficult for legit complaints to be taken seriously.

Corporate does not automatically equal lack of accountability. The bigger companies become the more difficult it becomes to manage false claims vs. legit ones. Using bad PR is a great resource to help a company perform better in the future.

Corporate does not automatically equal accountability either, which is why one should never buy a product in order to have someone to blame if it goes wrong. One should try to buy products that won't go wrong in the first place.

However, it is a mistake to think that legal action equals accountability either. The law, these days, has little provision for the judge to take the facts into account and lawyers don't put in equal effort, which means the law ceases to be about what is far and becomes who can game

If true, someone at Dell could end up having a friendly conversation with someone from the FBI.

If it was only exposure of private data (pictures) then Dell may have gotten away with a just a civil resolution. If it is true that the tech extorted a laptop, then it becomes a criminal case. People can go to jail.

This could become quite costly to Dell in terms of goodwill if proven that someone representing them extorted material goods from one of their own customers.

From what I saw, the laptop wasn't extortion (coercion or threat). He conned her. She was dumb and fell for it.

If he had been in the US, there could have been charges. The most she can really hope for is a civil resolution with Dell. I'm sure they'll pass the buck to "Dell India", a subsidiary of Dell, Inc. Most companies are very careful to segregate parts so the company as a whole cannot be held liable for infractions by a part. Usually it's set up so a partition of the company can

My take is that she got jealous that her indian boyfriend fell in love with that blondie, then made all this crap up. Why? You can see a chat window where she was clearly talking to someone she had some sort of love (or at least close) relationship with. "I'm worried about you"? Is that something you'd tell a company's representative "helping" you with a tech problem?

So she got mad that he fell in love with someone else after "making" her send him a laptop, and ma

First reading this article I felt bad for this woman. Even sending the guy the laptop, while extremely naive, seemed like something a person might do if they're petrified about their risque pictures appearing online and feel they have no out. Then I linked to the Reno Gazette article. I read this part, and well, she just doesn't seem like some innocent victim who was taken advantage of. I sort of wonder if in the end she actually sent him the nude pictures and then later regretted it when the guy from Indian that she was fantasizing about revealed that he was interested in a new girl:

"Romantic conversations

Following the initial technical call, conversations between Fitzgerald and Shaikh quickly turned personal. Fitzgerald admitted being flattered by the attention from the Indian support tech, whose MySpace page identifies him as being 24 years old. "He's very charming and he knew exactly what to say. It warmed my heart," she said.

Fitzgerald shared a number of personal e-mails Shaikh sent her from his Hotmail account shortly after their first conversation, including the following message dated Jan. 11, 2009:

"There are no words to express how I feel about you. I constantly search for the words, and they all seem less than I truly feel. You are my life, my heart, and my soul. You are my best friend. You are my one true love. I still remember the day we first met. I knew that you were the one I was meant to be with forever."

...

On Valentine's Day 2009, Fitzgerald said Shaikh told her he had fallen in love with a 22-year-old woman in Tennessee who had also called Dell technical support.

...

Fitzgerald later discovered two mysterious purchases on Feb. 17 totalling $802 charged to her Dell Preferred credit card. She called Dell and was told the charges were for a computer system and router shipped to a woman in Waynesboro, Tennessee."

I find this story hilarious. I'll never get tired of laughing at people being stupid. Unfortunately society has made it OK to be stupid about computers. The words "I'm not computer savvy" have become like fingernails on a chalk board to me. This woman didn't NEED to be computer savvy, she just needed to not be a complete maroon. The part about a stolen credit card... alright, I'll agree that was messed up and illegal. But the pictures, and sending a laptop... No excuse.
Why do we as a society allow people

- That Dell tech would go to the bother and expense of creating a whole website called "bitchtara.com" and domain to post incriminating photos of some random person who happened to call them, in the hopes that they would extort out of her, of all things, a DELL laptop...

- That the woman e-mailed them to her BF or whoever, and the photos made the rounds to someone who dislikes her (heck maybe her ex BF himself, and THEY set up the website.called "bitchtara.com", an obviously personal name, to try to get back

Nobody is this stupid. This is the internet version of calling up the beer company saying you found a dead mouse in a bottle of their product and please send one million dollars to ease the mental anguish.

She was trying to delete the pictures from an email that she had already sent to her boyfriend. I wonder if they are still dating, or if he just posted them in a drunken stupor one night. Dell was not the only one with access to the pictures and there will be little way to trace where the posting came from.

Well, the dell employee should be hanged upside down, that said, she certainly lowers the bar for dumb!

its already dumb enough to call tech support to recover your own nude pics, its even dumber she got convinced to send a laptop to the guy to help her with her nakedness problem., that's be-yond ridiculous.

In no way is this a typical case. This is a company that adverstises its 'pride in customer support' when after a year of complaints, Dell has even to respond to the victim. Though I am surprised to see so many Dell fanboys (Dellboys?) queueing up to mock a typical computer user who has at most basic computer skills. Lets face it only people with basic computer skills would probably even buy a Dell to begin with.

Someone calls the Dell hardware tech support to find the nude pictures of herself she can't locate on her own computer and you are telling us we shouldn't be mocking her?

And for the record, I am not a Dell fanboy, but we buy almost exclusively Dell where I work and their business tech support is top notch. I talk to real live Americans every time I call, and they never hassle me about anything. Say what you want about their "home computer" tech support, but their corporate support is very good.

And for the record, I am not a Dell fanboy, but we buy almost exclusively Dell where I work and their business tech support is top notch. I talk to real live Americans every time I call, and they never hassle me about anything.

And now allow me to quote from the wiki page about Dell.

In May 2008, the New York Supreme Court ruled that Dell and Dell Financial Services "engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices". The relevant lawsuit aimed primarily to highlight and seek restitution for a lack of technical support given to customers by Dell. The court plans to hold further proceedings to determine how much money Dell has to pay out to customers and how much profit Dell ma

Again their "home user" tech support and "corporate" tech support are worlds apart. I have no doubt their home support sucks - thankfully I don't ever use it seeing all my Dell purchases have been for work. I don't think Dell is the greatest, it is just my real world experience is much different from some of the stories I have read. Of the 4 major computer manufacturers we do business with at my job, Dell by far has the best business tech support out of any of them.

If you think that home tech support and corporate tech support are both run from the same service center in India, you are sorely mistaken. I have called their tech support directly in Texas many times before. The reason we buy Dell is the average discount due to the volume we buy, is around $400 per system. Nothing dumb about that.

People in Indonesia line up for MILES to get a US Outsourced job like this. They get paid roughly similar to what a DOCTOR in these places makes. They can live VERY nice, middle-class lives with the money they're making.

Maybe you should do a quick study on the Cost of Living in these countries before you start spouting off how Dell (or any other company) is "taking advantage" of workers in other countries.

Regardless of the local standard of living, they are being taken advantage of. If the job is worth a fixed amount, it should be worth that amount everywhere. Just because it can be outsourced to another country (India) for 10% or less of another country (USA), it isn't right to pay the lower rate.

The baseline pay rate should never be lowered. It should only be increased for areas of higher cost of living. Any company outsourcing knows that they can't pay the same rate in another countr

You sir are an idiot. The worth of a job is determined by the market. Probably why you stand around in cold weather outside with the other idiots. Must have gone to a tech school because a well rounded education might have taught you this. The very fact that the demand is so high for the jobs seems to most intelligent people that those people in line do not think they are being taken advantage of but most of them feel like they want the opportunity to do this work for that wage.

If the job is worth a fixed amount, it should be worth that amount everywhere.

You failed to say 'why' and this is absolutely a non-obvious statement. Imagine you're buying strawberries off of the side of the road, adjacent to the farm where they were grown. Now imagine those same strawberries being sold to you on the international space station. Still 'worth that same amount everywhere'? If not with commodities, like food, then why with labor?

The baseline pay rate should never be lowered. It should only be increased for areas of higher cost of living.

Okay... then all you need do is imagine that the lowest rate is the base, and all the others are the increased rate. Logical gap resolved.

You failed to say 'why' and this is absolutely a non-obvious statement. Imagine you're buying strawberries off of the side of the road, adjacent to the farm where they were grown. Now imagine those same strawberries being sold to you on the international space station. Still 'worth that same amount everywhere'? If not with commodities, like food, then why with labor?

That was a bad argument. Strawberries on the ISS are free to the consumer (the astronaut).

It's hard to place a monetary value on such things, though I entirely agree that it should at least be in the same country.

I heard this morning on the radio how do you reach a cost of each injured/sick/dying/dead pelican caused by the BP oil spill? They did what an economist did 30 years ago to read the same figure, ask away in a survey what people would pay to keep that from happening. Of course, the replies were CRAZY! Everything from $1-$10,000 PER pelican. But that is not how they reached the actual

While I agree that overseas support is more often than not hard to work with, we have to remember some of those experiences we've had here as well, such as a country boy with a heavy accent who isn't able to understand what we're saying.

Way back when, I had something similar happen. I was working in tech support for a small hosting provider in 1996. Our office hours were 8am to 6pm Eastern. I would show up late, and frequently work all kinds of ungodly late hours. That's the kind of person

Thats cool... I think you said something that's SO important but very few care to explore... getting an ear for other accents. I watch a lot of BBC programs (not a lot but whatever comes my way). When I saw Life on mars more than a few years ago now, I was able to hear everything, I just didn't know wtf they were talking about all the time lol. I think I figured out most of what they said, but the stuff i just couldn't were local to their area.

So if you want to take-down a company, all you need to do is get yourself and a few hundred friends to star war-dialing the company, so they will waste precious time (and money) answering the bogus calls at the Service Center

Just as there is little the company could do to stop this, they also have to expect to pay for the damage done. That is the price of doing business. Being liable for damages and being bad are not the same thing.

If one of the trees in my yard falls over in a storm and crushes my neighbors car, I am liable for paying for it. I am not a bad man because of it.

This woman called Dell. She did not look up this perticular tech person and seek his help. She called Dell. Dell answered the phone. They used this tech as their agent, but the company responded. The woman did not have a business arrangement with the tech. She had one with Dell. Is Dell evil for hiring this guy? Not likely. Are they responsible for the actions of their agent. Yes.

Dell is responsible for his actions he takes as an agent for Dell, such as stealing her pics. At some point the two developed a personal relationship that did not include Dell. Communications between the two that did not take part on company time or as part of his official duties are probably not Dell's problem.

Take your car analogy, the storm blows the tree over and it hits your neighbors car, likely your liability. Your neighbor than starts to date the tree online, buys it a computer and gives it her cred

Apparently, she didn't trust her own boyfriend. The Indian guy was telling her that her own boyfriend was the one who must have posted those pictures online. So apparently, that's all it takes for her, a random Indian guy from India telling her that her boyfriend is a creep.

Whether or not a company or employee has an obligation to respect your privacy (I think they always should do so, but that's irrelevant), if you are going to give them the opportunity to violate it, you had better be prepared for the consequences if they do. While you may have legal recourse against them, that recourse might not be any real consolation, so one should not presume that their confidential information will stay confidential, if they are giving access to it to somebody else who has not actually *personally* earned we sort of their trust through an already existing relationship of some kind.

Except, that is a shitty way to live. So we invented criminal punishments to deal with asshats.

The idea I was getting at is to not let it happen in the first place. While I will not ever treat anybody with any less than the same respect I would wish to be treated, I do not *expect* that level of respect from anybody I do not already personally know and have since come to trust. Call me a cynic, but when I have confidential data on a computer, it would be erased before I *EVER* gave somebody I did not so personally know permission to use my computer with the capability of accessing that data.